Tuesday, March 26, 2013

RANDOM THOUGHTS #134

Steve Cole muses about ballet.

During December, I surprised Leanna with a
birthday present: tickets to see The Nutcracker, which the local
ballet company puts on every year. The Lone Star Ballet puts on a show
that is far larger and more elaborate than many much larger cities,
costing well over a million dollars. Leanna had always wanted to go,
and I decided that it wouldn't kill me and besides I needed to do
something for her birthday.

I know very little
about ballet. There are, apparently, two of them, one of which has
ducks. The Nutcracker had no ducks so it must be the other one,
although it had so many things in it that it seems to me they could
just add some ducks and eliminate any need for a second ballet.

I have never seen
The Nutcracker (at least, not that I remember, maybe mother took me as
a child) but I knew the music. When I was growing up in the 60s every
family had a record player (not a stereo) and a copy of The Nutcracker
Suite as a long-playing vinyl album. With only three TV stations we
often had entire evenings with nothing we wanted to watch so playing
records was one way of filling the evening (often while reading a
book). For this reason, much of the music was very familiar.

The presentation seriously needed a
narrator who could speak a few lines now and then and explain what the
heck is going on. I had to go online the next day and read up on this
to find out what was happening.

The show begins
with Doctor Who (I guess that's who it was from the way he was
dressed) packing dolls into a sack and helping a robot girl get
dressed. (One has to wonder what he was doing with the robot girl
before she got dressed. Why would you ever need your robot girl to be
undressed?) Apparently, some rich guy was throwing a big Christmas
party and (for some reason) invited Doctor Who to show up instead of
Santa Claus. Doctor Who gives every girl a doll and every boy a toy
sword and gives Clara, the daughter of the rich guy, a nutcracker
dressed up like a toy soldier. (Everybody told me that Clara was the
star of the show but she frankly doesn't seem to do much, and does
almost nothing in the second inning.) He also has some other presents,
which seem to be more robots or something. There was also a bear,
which might or might not have been another robot.
The party winds down, the guests all go home, and the
family goes to bed. Clara comes back downstairs to play with her toy
nutcracker again. (One has to wonder if she's going to make a good
wife for someone a decade later, given her preference in toys.)
Anyway, she falls asleep and has an elaborate dream, which constitutes
the second half of the first inning and all of the second.
(Fortunately, there were only two innings.) If these are the dreams of
a twelve-year-old girl, she needs to seriously cut back on the crystal
meth.

Her dreams include some kind
of war between toy soldiers (who seem to be Russian hussars) and some
animals (maybe giant gerbils, only one of whom could afford to buy a
sword). The Russians eventually win (having more swords and a big
cannon), and tie up the gerbils. Then the nutcracker turns into Prince
William. Then Clara's dream goes outside and we see some lady in a
tiara dancing with a bunch of other people. Clara and Prince William
then mount some kind of magic sleigh (no reindeer? Maybe it's Doctor
Who's sleigh?) and fly off.

Then we have an
intermission, during which I (and several other husbands) tried to
make a break for the gun show in the other end of the civic center but
I got caught by Leanna and taken back to my seat. At the start of the
second inning, the giant gerbil attacked the conductor with his
scimitar right in front of my seat, but the conductor pulled out a
light saber. Doctor Who broke up the fight before it got interesting.
(Leanna's bad vision got us seats on the right end of the front
row.)

The synopsis of the second inning seems to be
"everybody's grandkid gets to do something" as it seems a
random collection of dances by Bo Peep, some German girls with pan
flutes, baby ballerinas, grown-up ballerinas, Chinese girls, Arab
girls, and a crazy lady with leprechauns under her skirt. (You'd
think with all of that, they could have had some ducks.) Then two
grownups danced onto the stage and hogged it for longer than the other
groups combined. I read later in the program book that these were
out-of-town ringers brought in for some reason I have yet to fathom.
(Note to the guy: if you're going to wear white pants that tight,
cut back on the Viagra. It was really embarrassing.) Then all of the
dancers came back on the stage and it become obvious that we were
close to the end (but still, no ducks). I gathered up my coat and when
the final curtain when down, Leanna made a run for the exit and I
followed. I read later that the producers get mad if you don't stay
until the cast comes back out and bows several times. Oops. Anyway, it
was Leanna who wanted to leave, because she was tired.

About Me

Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. is a game-publishing company that creates and publishes games based on the Original Series of Star Trek. We have a contract with Paramount Pictures to do so. Posts and blogs that are not directly related to gaming are the opinions of the individuals who write them, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.